You may have seen everyone baking banana bread on Instagram and the latest iced coffee craze on Tiktok. However, there’s a new food in town taking over your feed, and that’s the frying pan pizza.
Since we went into lockdown on 23 March, supermarkets have had their shelves stripped of the basic baking essentials as people take to the kitchen to cook up a storm. Getting hold of flour and eggs has been a mission, and you can see why from the number of cakes and bread being whipped up in kitchens up and down the country. According to Waitrose, they saw a 332% rise in people searching for ‘pizza dough’ on their website while sales of bread flour was a staggering 145% up year on year.
Instagram’s latest food trend
This super simple recipe has taken over the platform’s feed of late, and you don’t need a pizza oven to replicate its great taste.
Chef Tutor, Kendall Zaluski at Waitrose Cookery School, said ‘I actually think that the best way to get a top-notch pizza at home is in a frying pan – you get that initial heat to the bottom of the pizza, which gives a crispy base and better rise throughout the dough. Pizza is such a fun, family-friendly dinner to make and the topping possibilities and pizza shapes are endless, so it’s not surprising that it has become a lockdown staple.’
How it all started
In fact, the frying pan pizza is the brainchild of Thom and James Elliot, who created a frying pan pizza for their cookbook Pizza Pilgrims: Recipes from The Backstreets of Italy last summer.
Thom says: ‘We came up with the frying pan pizza while grappling with the problem of how to make a pizza at home. We tried all manner of ways to get a conventional oven up to the job – pizza stones, sheets of marble, steel trays, leaving the oven to heat up for four hours – and nothing was coming close.’
This trend has boomed since lockdown as people are missing out on their favourite restaurants and takeaway pizzas. Plus, everyone seems to be enjoying experimenting with different foods and recipes at home.
‘We’re getting loads of tweets from people who are doing it,’ says Thom.
They have also started giving away free dough balls at their pizzeria in Soho so individuals can take it home and try it for themselves. They’ve also sold frying pan kits online and have featured a recipe to follow on their website.
You don’t have to look far on social media to find examples of everyone’s creations. Instagrammer Kelly, of My Vegan Kitchen, shared a photo of her plant-based recipe, and food blogger Clerkenwellboy also featured his attempt at the frying pan pizza.
Waitrose has also released a simple recipe that you can follow. However, with the popularity of the latest trend, you might be hard-pushed to find the ingredients in your local supermarket!
